Phenomenology (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

To the things themselves. Rather than resting content with theoretical reconstructions of experience that stand in between us and things, phenomenologists return to the experience of things in their truth. Heidegger writes, The phenomenological maxim “to the things themselves” is addressed against construction and free-floating questioning in tradi

Experience does not take place in our brains but in the public world. Perception is the achievement of our whole body as we explore the world; flesh names the way our experiential exploration is inscribed into the bearing of our bodily being, making our experiential exploration available to the experience of others. Speech, which is instituted in b

“A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.”

Phenomenology investigates two seemingly trivial but in fact profound topics: the experience of essences and the essence of experience.

“philosophy may be paradoxically, but not unprofoundly, called the science of the trivial.”12

Phenomenology potently combines these two forces in philosophy, search for the elusive essence of things and wonder concerning the possibility of experiencing things. It renews Socrates’s relentless inquiry into what things are.10 It renews the modern relentless inquiry into how things are experienced.11 Phenomenology’s hybrid method holds these tw

Modern philosophy broke ranks with classical philosophy by shifting attention from the essence of things to the experience of things.

He finds this puzzling because experience seems to be something incidental to things, something that could hardly provide the foundation of knowing how things must be, and yet it is only via experience that we know things.

beings we are, to arrive at not only the truth of this, that, or the other thing but the truth about truth itself and how it arises in our experience.